The study looked at all plastic surgery procedures performed, and the day of the week that they occurred. It found that, when comparing weekends to weekdays, weekends were associated with significantly higher hospital costs and – perhaps more worrisome – longer stay at the hospital with potentially more complications.

If you extrapolate that data from the study, the conclusion you may have is that it’s safer and more affordable to schedule your body lift procedure on a weekday, rather than a weekend.

How Meaningful is the Data

Now, we can’t necessarily make any sweeping judgments from this type of data. It’s only correlational, and there are a lot of factors that go into what could cause these issues to occur. For example:

The Sample was Much Smaller – 98% of all surgeries took place on a weekday. That means only 2% took place on a weekend. Weekend body contouring surgeries are rare, which means that it will be more affected by smaller amounts of data.

Those That Can’t Take Time Off May Have Unique Characteristics – There is a recovery time associated with body contouring after weight loss. Theoretically, someone that is so busy they cannot schedule their appointment until a weekend may struggle with stress, may be a hard worker,

Surgeons that Work Weekends May Have Unique Characteristics – Most surgeries are performed on weekdays, which means that the surgeons that schedule more often on weekends may also have unique characteristics that are different from the rest of plastic surgeons.

But there could also be factors that are affected by weekend body contouring procedures as well. For example, perhaps plastic surgeons are more tired on weekends because they have performed surgery all throughout the week, or perhaps inpatient procedures at hospitals are more likely to have overcrowding, thus increasing the risk of disease or changing the quality of care.

It's unlikely that there is any difference between getting a body contouring procedure on a weekday versus getting it on a weekend. But it’s still an interesting study nonetheless. As plastic surgeons, it’s our job to make sure we stay up to date with the latest in plastic surgery research, and one thing that we can learn from this type of information is that, if plastic surgery is scheduled for a weekend, perhaps we can make sure that any extraneous factors that affect risk are accounted for.

If you would like to talk about scheduling your body contouring procedure with Dr. Agha of Plastic Surgery Body Contouring Center in Newport Beach, contact us today at 949-644-2442.